Small Niche Sites (Min. Traffic Reccomendations)

Most people know some basic metrics to look for when picking a niche. We look for a variety of factors such as domain authority, page ranking, etc. Depending on the tools you use you probably are exposed to some custom proprietary metric. Arguably monthly traffic is one of the most important factors when establishing a niche. It's got to be small enough that the competition isn't fierce, yet big enough that you will actually get traffic. You would obviously much rather be on the first page of Google for a keyword that gets 4000 exact searches per month, than on the 5th page for a keyword that gets 400000 searches per month.

I've seen approaches from people who target sites that are 20-40k searches a month to people targeting keywords that get 200 a month. I personally think that's risky. I've found the sweet spot for my approach for authority sites to be around 3-7k with some decent competition.

My personal minimum is 3k min searches per month (Exact match!)

Have you had any success going lower?

I tend to silo content so one of my niche sites will have 80 categories and each category may have 5-20 subcategories. Each cat and subcat is an exact match on a target search term. One site will typically cover 500-1500 niche keywords but all will be closely related to site topic. Once the site has about 10 months of age it typically pops and starts drawing good traffic. I prefer throwing big nets in target keyword spaces. The successes naturally rise to the surface in Google analytics. It also allows me to spend more time picking the spaces I want to be in instead of worrying about whether or not any one individual search term is good or not.

The other benefit is the footer linking... across all my niches I have a great deal of control for crafted backlinking... Just because of the nature of my niche sites I can easily give 5000 backlinks here and 50,000 backlinks there... Even the fail niches add to this value making the successes that much better.

Depends on what you're chasing, doesn't it?
If you want 200 sites each earning $100/mth, low search volumes can work well because they're generally not competed for, and you can rank fast and strong with little to no effort.

I think it's a case of needing to know your end goal, or your 'photo finish' position first, and then start mapping a strategy to get there. Defining strategy, or even generating ideas, isn't really going to help you if you don't know clearly and firmly where you're going and why.